(New!) Read (or post) about people who have stuck with No-S for 10 or more months, lost 10 or more pounds, or 10 or more percent for their starting weight. Periodic updates strongly encouraged -- you can think of it as "Yearly Check In."

This year, the results are flat in term of my weight: no major losses, but no major gains, either. But given the [bleep] I've had going on over this past year, maintenance is a [bleep]in' triumph, and I will absolutely count it as a success. An extraordinarily Bad Thing happened back in February, and in the grand scheme of things it's a wonder I'm not forty pounds heavier than I was a year ago.

(I did laugh at myself a little when I gave myself permission to take nearly a full week of S days, around that time ... I don't smoke, drink, or run around with loose women, so permission to eat sweets whenever I like is basically my equivalent of going on a multi-day bender. It's all relative to what you get used to, I suppose .)

I've taken this anniversary as an occasion to do a summary of the year-over-year changes in each of the eight (wow!) years I've been sticking to NoS. Here's the summary, with each number indicating the *change* compared to the previous year (and links back to my yearly check-ins from those years):

I've done some rounding off, but that's the general idea: lost 20 pounds right away, kept it off for several years, struggled with gradual weight gain for a couple years, turned it around, then this Year of the Bad Thing stalled my progress ... But I don't see any fundamental barrier to getting back on track towards reaching my year 1 low once again.

Still vanilla NoS, here: no special rules about S days beyond the basic set. I generally try not to have more than one non-weekend S day in a month, as a default. That's about the rate of major national holidays, for most of the year, so just taking S days on days when workplaces are closed works out nicely and doesn't require a lot of decision-making. (Though this year my birthday falls on a weekday, and I'm totally going to take that as an S day, yippee!)

So after eight years I guess you could say that I'm a satisfied customer. I've only made one real "convert" after all these years, although about 90% of people who hear about the plan say some variant of "Yeah, that makes sense, I should do that" -- and then they don't. This includes my family, but I'm still optimistic that one day I'll get them on board. (I've recently been wondering about easing them into it with something I'm calling "NoST", pronounced "No est", which would be NoS except applied to days that start with S *or* T -- so NoSing on just Monday/Wednesday/Friday to start with. Maybe that's a small enough commitment, just three days a week, to get them to try it, we'll see ...)

Congratulations on another year on habit and thank you for letting us know!

Nothing makes me happier than these consistent check-ins, year after year.

Love the "summary" links to previous, check-ins, too. And I appreciate the honesty when some years weren't as quantitatively successful as others. So important for people to see that that can happen, and one can still, big picture, remain on track.